There are a handful of Group Policy settings that can make your life so much easier! One awesome troubleshooting setting that we’ve covered is Group Policy Verbose Mode. Today, we are going to cover two settings that can speed up your logons, stop auto-updaters (like Java), and secure your machines. The first one will kill the MSConfig Startup tab. The second grants us exclusions.

What is the legacy run list and how to kill it?

If you have ever taken a look at the Startup tab in MSConfig (or in Task Manager on Windows 8+), you’ve seen the legacy run list. This startup list is normally populated with drivers applications and certain start once applications.

As an example, my machine has two application updaters, a music app, my phone’s tethering app, and several driver apps. Most of these applications have corresponding icons in the notification area on your taskbar. Take a quick look at your notification area and your legacy run list.

By using Group Policy, we can make our computers ignore the legacy run list. Within an unlinked GPO, navigate to Computer Configuration/Policies/Administrative Templates/System/Logon. Enable Do Not Process the Legacy Run List.

After enabling, scope and link the GPO to a test computer. Pay attention to the notification area on your machine and reboot once. You can also run a gpupdate and log out/log back in. You should notice fewer icons in the notification area and probably had a faster logon!

This is awesome! Prepare to die MSConfig Startup tab!

Yes, it is awesome but hold on one more minute. This policy has the potential to break certain apps in your environment. Two notable examples are security software and interactive software (like SmartBoards).

When you have an application that should start automatically, you can add it to the Run these programs at user logon Group Policy setting. This setting is found within the same System/Logon folder.

Take a slow and steady approach on deploying this setting. Once deployed, you will have faster logons, a cleaner desktop, and a safer machine! All of this from just killing the MSConfig Startup tab. If you have any Group Policy settings that you couldn’t live without, share them in the comments below.

2 thoughts on “Kill MSConfig Startup and Speed Up Your Logons”

This is a good tip. I’ve actually taken a slightly different approach myself. When using MDT to deploy a new machine, I am finding I typically wrap my installers in a batch file (example: setup.bat) and at the end of the batch script I’ll typically run any cleanup needed to delete that program’s keys from the Run registry key. This way I take care to only delete those entries for programs I know I don’t want starting up at boot and leave others (like antivirus as you mentioned) intact.